Carolyn Hank

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School of Information Sciences

Assistant Professor

Dr. Hank’s dissertation research looked at scholars who blog, and how blog characteristics and blogger behaviors, preferences, and perceptions impact digital preservation. Building from this work, Dr. Hank’s long-term research objectives are to contribute to an ever-evolving understanding of the complex behavioral, social, legal and technical issues in digital content stewardship in order to inform further development of efficient tools, approaches, requirements and policies for deliberate personal and organizational preservation programs. As a necessary extension, in consideration of issues of scale, appraisal and future use, she is also interested in supporting and advancing “unpreservation” as well; namely, how do we deal with the digital traces we leave behind that are not intended to be available into either the short-term or indefinite future? The rise in third-party Web-based publishing and application services, as well as cloud computing services, inhibits content producers’ ability to control the information they create, share and maintain through such services. For example, while we may take intentional action to delete a blog post, Facebook update or a Tweet, it challenges the saying, “gone but not forgotten.” Simply put, does the Web ever "forget?"

In addition to her appointment at SIS-UTK, Dr. Hank is an instructor in the Digital Curation Professional Institute: Curation Practices for the Digital Object Lifecycle, hosted at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prior to joining SIS-UTK, Dr. Hank was an assistant professor at McGill University (2010-2012), where she taught in the areas of digital preservation and access, digital curation, human information interactions, and research methods.

BlogForever (2011-2013), a co-funded European Commission project under the Information and Communication Technologies theme of the 7th Framework Programme for R&D (FP7). (Role: Sub-contractor/consultant)